Sramana Mitra: The vision of this part of the world you are seeing is that this data brokering layer, which is absorbing all this device data coming from all over the place, is going to be captured and managed and break out onto different layers as well. And you will see a platform as a service layer to do the horizontal part of it. Then there are going to be apps developed on this platform as a service that are going to provide the contextualization and the domain-specific business logic.

Constantin Delivanis: That is correct. The way I envision it is data as a service layer and platform as a service is where people are absorbing the data and using the logic [to create] apps for targeted horizontal needs.

SM: And you are providing the horizontal layer?

CD: Data as a service is all we do.

SM: Do you have a lot of application vendors that are building apps on top of your data as a service?

CD: No. We are not building apps. All we do is identify, organize, and add context to this massive amount of data.

SM: Today, given the way you are going into market, who is providing the contextualization on top of your data?

CD: Let me give you an example: the biggest Windows 7 migration in the world, which was roughly 450,000 desktop devices and one billion rows of data stored in a silo. This company wanted to figure out whether its stock was ready to be migrated or not. The only way to know how to do it was to do it manually. They had to go in and look at the data, see what they have on their laptops, check if there is enough memory, if the software they were running was upgradeable, etc. In this particular case, we grabbed one billion rows of data, filtered roughly 95% of it, because these are not relevant to this particular problem, take the filtered data, organized it, and then we added context in this particular case.

SM: In this you were providing the contextualization as well?

CD: Absolutely. That is our bread and butter, because we have the biggest catalog of contextual data in the world.

SM: In this case those two layers are not separate. You are providing both the platform and the business logic.

CD: I didn’t provide business logic, yet I added context.

SM: But the contextualization requires business logic as well. You cannot contextualize anything without some business logic.

CD: That is part of your data as a service platform. Of course, there is some logic there to add.